Pandoro crown is the perfect spoon dessert for Christmas, and New Year's Eve, and makes for an ideal way to ensure it doesn’t go to waste. It’s a very spectacular and versatile Holiday dessert because there are many different fillings, and it can be prepared in advance since it needs to be stored in the freezer. Ready to find out how to do it?
How to make the crown
To make a crown with the pandoro use a 23 cm diameter hinge mold. Cut the pandoro in sections slicing them at about 2 cm high and use one for the base of the cake. Then divide the others into four equal parts and create the frame of the crown by covering the holes left at the base. In practice, the tips of the pandoro become the tips of the crown.
Sweet cream filling
There are plenty of ways to fill the pandoro crown. You can prepare a cream by whipping together the same amount of fresh cream and mascarpone with icing sugar and this is the easiest and fastest thing to do. You can even enrich this cream with red fruits to counteract the excessive sweetness or if you want something super tasty you can add hazelnut or pistachio cream. Other possibilities are tiramisu cream prepared with mascarpone cheese and eggs or a Bavarian cream with your preferred flavor. The most important thing is the consistency of the filling which needs to be nice and firm and doesn’t come apart when sliced.
How to make Christmas Hazelnut Cream
4 oz hazelnut paste, 4 oz milk chocolate, 4 oz gianduia chocolate, 4 oz dark chocolate, 1 ½ oz very fine sugar, ¾ oz sunflower oil, ½ oz bitter cocoa, vanilla pods, salt
For the hazelnut cream recipe, chop the chocolates, collect them in a bowl and melt them on a hot but not boiling bain-marie. Incorporate, then, off the heat, the hazelnut paste, oil, cocoa, the seeds scraped from half a vanilla pod, sugar and a pinch of salt.
Stir with a spatula until you have obtained a homogeneous mixture. Blend for less than 30 seconds with an immersion mixer to make it perfectly smooth and glossy.
How to Make Mascarpone Cream
1 lb Milk, 7 oz Mascarpone, 4 ½ oz Caster sugar, 3 oz White Rum, 300 cl Amaretto liqueur, 1 oz White flour, ¾ oz Cocoa, 3 Yolks, Vanillin, Savoyards, Whipped cream, Chocolate puff pastries, Candied cherries
With milk, sugar, flour, egg yolks, and a sachet of vanillin you’ll make a custard. Then divide it into two equal parts, adding cocoa to one of the two. Let the creams cool, then mix each one with 100 gr of mascarpone, stirring. To the yellow cream add 1 oz rum, to the one with chocolate, add Amaretto liqueur or another of your choosing.
Prepare 6 cups: on the bottom arrange 2 chopped ladyfingers and sprinkle them with 2 oz Rum diluted with an equal amount of much water. Finally distribute between the cups the 2 creams proceeding with alternate spoons to get the variation of shades.
Complete by decorating each cup with a large tuft of whipped cream, a candied cherry, and some chocolate flakes. If you don’t serve the dessert immediately, keep it in the fridge covered with cling film (the cream absorbs the smells of the fridge).
Soaking
The base of the pandoro should be slightly damp, which obviously depends on the cream you will use for the filling.
A coffee immersion is always a good choice in combination with mascarpone cream, but if you want something more delicate it’s also good to simply use milk lightly flavored with vanilla, or rum if the dessert isn’t served to children.
If the crown is to have a fruit-based cream can use a tea or pineapple juice slightly diluted with water in addition to the milk.
How to decorate the Pandoro Crown
We suggest putting a satin or even paper ribbon around the circumference, not only to make the dessert lovely to serve, but also to keep the walls of the crown in place if the cream inside is compact and cold. Then play with berries, chocolate chips, icing sugar and bitter cocoa to make the surface of the crown very spectacular.
Pandoro Crown Recipe
As we have already said you need a pandoro to cut into sections. Then prepare the cream with 1 lb mascarpone and 2 cups fresh cream and about 4 oz sugar. You can also use vegetable cream already sweetened (always whipping) because it stays nice and compact. Mascarpone and cream should be cold in the refrigerator and whipped together with electric whips. Once the base and the circumference of the crown have been arranged, wet the base, and fill it with the cream.
The crown should cool in the freezer for three hours. If instead of mascarpone and cream you use a Bavarian cream or panna cotta, leave the dessert in the refrigerator.